Introducing Zed: A high-performance, multiplayer code editor. Now in beta.

March 15th, 2023

Last year, my co-founders and I began coding in Zed for the first time. From the first moment, I was in love. Not because Zed was my baby (though it is). Our previous editor, Atom, was also my baby, but I never loved using it like I love using Zed.

What captured my heart on that first day of coding was Zed's exceptional responsiveness. When we began this project, we made a commitment to ourselves to do whatever it took to make our editor fast. We chose Rust for its combination of low-level control and expressiveness, then wrote our own GPU-accelerated UI framework to transcend the limitations of Electron. We also created Tree-sitter, an incremental parsing framework that not only gives us far more precise results than regexes, but also does it much faster. With every data structure and algorithm we created, we were determined to make speed Zed's first killer feature.

But Zed is more than just a faster editor. We believe one of the key bottlenecks for software developers is our ability to communicate effectively about code. That's why we've engineered Zed with collaboration as a first-class concern. Today, that means the ability to invite other users into your projects to seamlessly write and discuss code together in real time. In the coming months, we'll build on this foundation to introduce text-based conversations, so you can discuss any part of your codebase at any time, not just code that has been recently committed.

Of course, the beta release we're sharing today is a shadow of the tool we envision, and we're looking forward to chiseling away the marble in the coming months and years. Yet as we look forward to tomorrow, we're proud of what Zed is today. It's time for our baby to leave the nest.

We hope you'll come to love it as much as we do.